Retribution now outperforms the feral DPS spec, which is widely considered the most difficult spec in the game to play, and requires playing in ways that were not developer intended to do DPS that is now on the tier of “joke specs” such as Arms, Elemental, Frost and Subelty.
What is wrong with feral?
The difficulty to reward ratio is completely out of whack. This is because feral does not deal viable DPS unless wonky, work-around rotations are performed (i.e. bearweaving, flowerweaving, idol weaving, snake weaving, etc).
Proposed fixes:
Reduce feral threat. It is unacceptable for a feral druid to constantly produce tank-level threat despite doing some of the lowest DPS in the game.
Simplify the rotation. The player base does not dislike bearweaving, which is a mechanic they invented to compensate for bad DPS, but bearweaving in a DPS optimal manner (with lacerate stacks maintained) is difficult, and nearly impossible in select encounters. The short 15 second lacerate duration is a large part of this being problematic.
Patch up wonky RNG mechanics, either by removing flowershifting entirely, or guaranteeing a clearcast when it hits 20+ players in the raid.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Addendum
Of course, this thread won’t get the traction the paladin thread did, because paladins were and are the best class in the game for PvE content in Wrath, and enjoy monumental popularity as a result. The notion that a class that is widely played and is generally considered to be overtuned is alone deserving of buffs merely because they have the most voices to complain is laughable.
Boomie is pretty strong so Druids do have another dps option. That was the whole point of wanting to buff ret, there just wasn’t a paladin dps option. For druids, if feral is lacking, at least you can try balance.
Please understand, feral is my favourite! Of course I want the class to do well, but you can’t really compare the ret pally situation to how ferals are.
Is feral threat over the top? Honest question here… I went all through Naxx and didn’t really find I had an issue. I don’t run in a top-parsing guild and haven’t had the chance to do Ulduar yet though.
Do not!! The complexity of the feral rotation is what makes it interesting. WotLK still has a lot of one-button classes and it’s super meh. I don’t mind feral doing less dps as long as it stays interesting!
Ahhhh that’s a gimmick that probably shouldn’t exist. Like, having more clear casting procs is good, but having to burn a reagent and being in a 25-man raid to maximize the benefit is a bit bonkers. I think the only reason Blizzard hasn’t nerfed this like they did DKs is because it’s just not making feral druids do an additional 3k dps, or whatever it was
" 1. Not a Goal – Embark on an effort to provide ongoing balance to all classes phase over phase. We think its very important to WoW Classic that classes behave largely as you’d expect them to throughout the current expansion without constantly worrying about major design changes altering the feel of the class. This includes having them scale mostly as you’d expect them to. Warriors are a great example of this, and in almost every early expansion of WoW, Warriors start weak and scale exceptionally well with gear. This is especially true in Wrath where Armor Penetration becomes more prevalent and available around the midpoint of the expansion, and gear in the later tiers is more tightly optimized to allow Warriors to lean into their strengths and shine. This sort of ebb and flow feels right for classic and we do not want to change this paradigm, and feel that these adjustments will allow Retribution to stay more relevant now without creating a massive new imbalance or placing them well above where we’d expect them to be relative to other classes and specs during this or future phases."
and
“1. Not a Goal – Bring all of the classes with poor PvE output up similarly. Frost Mages, Subtlety Rogues, Arms Warriors, and Beast Mastery Hunters are all at or below the output of Retribution in PvE and it would be easy to point to this change and say “What about [insert spec here]”. That’s fair, and this very argument was a motivator for us holding off on making changes here. A key argument that swayed us however is that all of those classes have very viable alternatives for PvE DPS, whereas Paladins only have Retribution in this role. All of these specs also have traditionally been viewed as PvP specs, and we are very leery to shift the meta in PvP while chasing a buff to PvE. This is why we went the direction we did for Retribution; as the impact to PvP shouldn’t be large. We’ll continue to evaluate things as time goes by, but we do not have any plans for other similar class adjustments after this one.”
Playing in this unintended way as a feral druid isn’t simply the most difficult specialization to execute in wrath of the lich king, it is the most difficult specialization to execute in all of WoW history.
This isn’t acceptable for the lowest DPS in the game outside of specs that blizzard has now explicitly stated will not be made viable.
If you disagree, we can talk about why you’re not correct.
I post when people seem to have not read it, and then I generally agree that there should be more balancing. The blue posts have the general metric and consideration reasoning in them that would answer half of these threads being spammed had they read the post instead of being upset about the buff.
this is false 100%.
I would love for actual balancing to exist within classic and always have. you can keep telling lies if you want though.
I agree, it has a very high skill ceiling and, at least looks, painfully annoying to execute. Some streamlining or balance would be useful for feral both tank and DPS.
It sits in a similar way as shaman do, you have two DPS specs but unlike other dps classes with more than one both shamans and druids have to entirely regear if they reroll from say feral to balance or enhance to ele. There’s definitely room for improvement in other classes for sure balance wise.
You’re likely not going to get any useful responses to this thread outside of a bunch of rets trying to explain why they are the only spec in the game that is entitled to not respec and why noone apart from themselves is allowed to play a non meta spec.
Prove it. You couldn’t before and you still can’t.
I post is because reading is useful and the decisions are explained within the post linked. Keep telling lies and spinning your wheels on this because you are flat wrong.
Prove what? That you don’t want to give anyone else the option to respec but think it’s totally fine that you do? The proof is in the hundreds of ret complainers club posts you guys posted every day for months on end.
I just realized…this isn’t even a ret pally thread it’s a feral thread. You can’t even help yourself from bombarding threads about a completely different class/spec. Geez.
